The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Dick Visser <address@concealed>]

Hi guys

​In the 

docs at http://www.sympa.org/manual/authentication#generic_sso_paragraph

​ 

​t

he term 'environment variables' and HTTP headers are 

​​

used interchangeably.​

​For instance:​

​

• http_header_list 
  Sympa gets user attributes from environment variables coming from the web server. These variables are then cached in the user_table DB table for later use in authorization scenarios (in structure). You can define a coma-separated list of header field names.

​

AFAIK, Apache environment variables are something distinctly different than HTTP headers.

​Y​

ou can

​ ​

configure one to be dependent on the other, for instance set HTTP headers based on a the content of some environment variable.

​But they're not the same.

FYI, the context for this is that I'm trying to get federated authentication going​ using mod_mellon.

This module populates environment variables, and the Sympa docs made me think that Sympa needed HTTP headers.

So I configured Apache to populate these, based on the environment variables, like this:

       RequestHeader unset CONF_EMAIL

       RequestHeader set CONF_EMAIL "%{MELLON_mail}e" env=MELLON_mail

​It didn't appear to work.

In the end I found out that ​Sympa uses the environment variables and not the HTTP headers.

So the intermediate step with HTTP headers isn't needed (which is good).

Maybe the docs could be updated to clarify this.

Thanks!!

--
Dick Visser
System & Networking Engineer
TERENA Secretariat
Singel 468 D, 1017 AW Amsterdam
The Netherlands